


Two Million Shards

by WaterandWin



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-01
Updated: 2011-08-01
Packaged: 2017-10-22 02:19:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/232632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WaterandWin/pseuds/WaterandWin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sollux: Be the murderer</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Million Shards

**Author's Note:**

> For Homesmut:
> 
>  _So...I just went through a pretty bad breakup, anons, and reading something really emotionally intense would help me lick my wounds, I think. I don't care whether you make my gums bleed and give me diabetes or you make me short my computer out with tears (okay that's a lie I would prefer the former but the latter is fine too). I just need one or the other right now._
> 
>  _Sollux/Aradia (Pre-FLARP is preferable to post-FLARP but now I'm just being nitpicky) is kinda my OTP and there's never enough with them, so I would love it if you could write something with them, but honestly any two characters who really love each other like they did are fine._
> 
>  _Smut is always nice, but never a necessity, so you can write that if you like it or not if you don't._

You wake up face down on the roof surrounded by bright, bright sunshine. You know you’re on the roof because you can just barely see your lusus out of the corner of your eye, chained up safely and sleeping. Everything hurts, your brain throbs, and the voices are cackling. The sun is blinding, and you raises an arm to shield your eyes to try and figure out how you got up here. 

Your arm is covered in maroon blood. 

You stare at it before your eyes slowly glide to your fingers. The blood is baked on from being exposed to daylight. A single black hair is curled in the sticky mess. You know that color, and you know that hair. What you don’t know is why they are here and for some reason your brain refuses to function properly. The light is making your eyes hurt and with great effort you try to lift your aching frame. There is an empty cup in your other hand. You wonder how it got there and the voices take on an even more mocking tone. You groan, cover your ears, and wait for sundown.

When you wake up again, your lusus is roaring in frustration. It can’t get at the dregs at the bottom of the cup. You lift yourself up from the sticky puddle and watch, dumbfounded. Your brain is still just barely sludging along and the voices are not helping, but your body hurts much less, save for some mild sunburn. Sure enough, there are a few drops of yellow at the bottom of the glass. 

A memory surfaces. That glass had been full.

You look down at his hands. Maroon. So much maroon. On you, on the roof, everywhere. And then there’s that glass of mind honey. 

The realization hits you like a sack of rocks and for one heart-wrenching second you think you’re going to be sick. And then you are. There isn’t much in your stomach, but what little there is comes spilling out onto the bloodied concrete. 

There was no time to catch your breath. You will with all your might for your brain to obey you, and through a splintering headache it does, lighting you up purple. You speed as fast as your psionics can carry you out over the stirring hive stem cluster and into the fields.

When you see the smoke rising from her hive in the distance your powers fail you and you tumble to the ground, landing hard on your shoulder. It protests sharply when you ignore it and run instead. You trip several times into mud and brambles and more and more into ash, but push yourself up each time without slowing down. 

When you get to the crest of the hill nearest to what was once her hive, however, you collapse to your knees entirely. Only smoking ruins remain, spewing black clouds into the sky. Remnants of psychic energy still charge the atmosphere, and there, just outside the hive, you can just barely make out a splatter of maroon. No body of course; your powers had easily vaporized any flesh and bone, leaving behind what had been left from the initial explosion. Summoning up the remainder of your strength, physical and psychological, you moves closer.

You can’t bear to look at the charred earth where she had spent her last moments. The voices are all too keen to point out how much at fault you are, and if they had bodies you would stop at nothing to ensure they receive a fate much worse than hers. 

In a daze you trudge into the ruins. You had visited before, but everything is wrong now, burned and crushed and hurled through walls. It’s a marvel the thing was still standing. You run your hands along the corridors, walk through every room, searching for nothing and finding even less. Your brain is on autopilot; your heart does not protest. After losing track of how many times you had toured the hive, you simply sit, collapsing where you stand.

How long you stay there you don’t know, but not surprisingly when your mood does shift, it is sudden and explosive. Anger boils, and with nowhere to direct it, you direct it at everything. At yourself, at her, at the walls of the ruined hive. You punch and throw and scream until your voice gives out; you pull at your hair and sear the earth and stain your cheeks yellow.

And when the episode ends as suddenly as it had begun, you whimper her name, apologize to empty air, and refuse to move. When day begins to break you make no effort to return home. A second day without the calming slime is hell, but you lavish in the misery you know is less than half of what was deserve. The dreams writhe in your subconscious, egged on by voices urging more, more, more. 

Once, twice, you think you see her drifting through your nightmares. A swoosh of black curls here, a pearl of music laughter there, but always a phantom. You try to call out but your voice refuses to obey. And then you was drowning in a sea of maroon. 

You wake at what you think is the sound of you name, but is really silence. You wake again when you felt her hand on your cheek, but there is nothing. You wake when the sun sets and angry at your tantrum the night before, you return home to grow up and be a big troll.

The journey back to your hive is like something out of a dream. You go through the motions without thought. Your hive is a mess, so you clean it. Your lusus is complaining, so you feed it. Your mouth is as dry as a desert, so you drink gallons. Your clothes are stiff with blood, so you change. Then, just as you prepare to lie on your face for the next several sweeps, your computer lights up and Trollian chimes. 

You look over at it with no intention to answer until the maroon text assaults your vision and makes you weak in the knees.

\-- apocalypseArisen [AA] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]\--

AA: s0llux  
AA: are y0u there  
AA: hell0

You stare at the screen, unable to believe your eyes. Perhaps it's a data ghost, just a segment of code that had been floating around in the system until it surfaced just now to prove how much the world hated you.

AA: if y0u are busy i will try again later   
TA: no waiit.   
TA: are you 2tiil there?   
AA: yes   
TA: how?   
TA: ii mean   
TA: are you okay?   
AA: yes   
AA: i am very 0kay   
AA: i am 0kay with everything   
TA: uhh, that’2 good   
TA: where were you?   
AA: i am at my hive   
AA: i have n0t left   
TA: are you 2ure about that?   
AA: yes   
TA: ii wa2 ju2t there a few hours ago.   
AA: i kn0w   
TA: ii diidn't 2ee you.   
AA: i did n0t expect you to   
TA: uh, what doe2 that even mean aa?   
AA: have y0u finished adapting the game   
TA: what?   
TA: no, not yet.   
AA: y0u must finish s00n   
AA: it is alm0st time

\-- apocalypseArisen [AA] has ceased trolling twinArmageddons [TA]\--

TA: tiime for what?

Too late. You try to message her again, but receive no response. The strange alien disks sit on the edge of your desk, and each time your eyes drift in their direction the voices resound in hurried whispers about meteors, your fated blindness, and everyone’s eventual death. You had long ago learned that the voices never lied. Until this point, you had worked on cracking the game’s code to satisfy Aradia’s curiosity. Now, you would continue, though damned if you knew why.

The technology is stubborn and primitive, but once you crack it down to the actual code, it’s actually quite elegant. It reminds you of her, and whenever you remember her, you remember the disks and the task she left you and press on. It’s a vicious cycle, really. Vicious and horrible and two thousand times worse when she trolls you and asks about progress. Each time you see message from her on screen your digestive sack does a little flip-flop and so does your mood. The mood shifts are getting more erratic by the day. It’s almost enough to interfere with your work. Almost. On days when you realize the sun is already setting and you haven’t slept yet, much less blinked for what feels like hours and your fingers are all cramps and soreness, you wonder if it’s all worth it. 

Like clockwork, she checks on you again like she’s reminding you that it is.

Talking to her might be easier if it was actually her you were talking to. It’s her account, it’s her way of typing, and yet it’s not really her. She’s different. She’s empty. Empty is the only way to really describe it. She’s just a voice and not much else and there are times when you wish you could just reach through your monitor and shake her and shake her until she becomes her old self again instead of this  _thing_  that won’t get out of your head. You hate it, you hate her, and more than anything you hate yourself. If Karkat didn’t troll you to brag about whatever shitty progress he made with ~ATH that you probably figured out equinoxes ago, you might have just lost it completely. 

Two days before the meteors come, you finish. You burn twenty-four disks, just like she asks, twelve sets in all, and pass out at your desk. When you wake up twenty-two of the disks are gone without a trace and you don’t question it, you just crawl into your recuperacoon and curl up to die. 

When you finally do die, it’s not in your recuperacoon, but on an alchemizer. The last thought through your cracking think pan isn’t of the princess you just saved, but of her.

When you see her again, actually see her, you don’t know if you want to strangle the one who did this to her or drop to your knees and weep. It’s her--from the way her hair frames her face to he curve of her jaw to all the way down to carefully sculpted figure ending in her perfect ankles--and yet it’s not her. It’s metal and it suits her new personality, the one that’s not actually a person but a shell. You shouldn’t be disappointed that she looks right past you like she doesn’t even remember who you are or doesn’t care, but every time those empty red eyes gloss over you it feels like someone just spilled ice water inside your chest. 

What’s worse is the way  _he_  looks at her. It’s like he owns her, and it makes you sick to think that in a way he actually does. In the most physical sense he knows her body inside and out, knows it well enough to loving craft a metal coffin for it, and all you know is that even if you could work metal the way he can, you’d never get it just right. The worst part is that she returns his attention, and returns it in a way that you can’t even tell what quadrant it is, just that it’s concupiscent as fuck and something inside you threatens to reach boiling point if you stare too long. 

You’d hate him if you could. You really, really would with all the rage and hurt and frustration that’s whispered in your ear every second of every waking moment and every dream by voices you can’t see or understand half the time. But you can’t, not when it seems like he can make her feel something inside all that emptiness. He can momentarily make the dead feel alive again, and all you can do is reassemble the pieces of her that you can find in the princess and pretend until you can convince yourself that the reality of the situation is that if she never lays eyes on you again for the rest of your life she wouldn’t know the difference.

And then she trolls you one last time.

She’s as confusing and cryptic as ever but there’s a note of finality to it you just can’t shake. And then you look up and she’s looking at you and her eyes are bright, bright like all the suns in all the universes and glowing with something you can’t quite place because it’s not life, robots aren’t alive, but she’s as close as any robot as ever been, you’d swear on it. Her mouth is turned up in that little smile you haven’t seen in what feels like lifetimes and then she turns to you and embraces you and she’s not cold and metallic. Well, she’s metallic but she’s warm and even though you know what you feel against your chest is some kind of hydraulic pump, when you close your eyes she’s as real and alive as the day you last saw her, the day you’ve called up in your memory again and again until you start to question if the whole thing wasn’t just a figment of your imagination to begin with, but no, the answer is no, it's real and she's real and she's  _alive_. You’re paralyzed with so many emotions you’d never thought you’d feel again that before you can wrap your arms around her in return she’s pulling away and taking her little flutter of life with her. But that’s alright, because the warmth clinging to your clothes testifies to the fact that your Aradia is still inside that metal circuitry somewhere, transcending death itself. 

And then she takes a step back and all that delicate circuitry flies into two million pieces, one for each shard of your heart.


End file.
